Susanna Malkki’s Wide Appeal on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Image

“I think life is important. Work is not everything, but I really love what I’m doing. It’s been very busy for the past 10 or 15 years, and I love every minute of it,” Susanna Malkki said.CreditSimon Fowler

A few months ago, during the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of Unsuk Chin’s 2007 opera “Alice in Wonderland,” Susanna Malkki did something you hope a conductor never does while the music is still going: She left the podium.

It was only her calmness as she walked offstage, while the orchestra played the final part of the first act, that gave it away that this was no emergency, but rather another cute touch in Netia Jones’s antic staging of Ms. Chin’s surreal opera.

Ms. Malkki, 46, has generally been striding toward orchestras in recent years, not away from them. Having made debuts with both the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras already this season, on Thursday she conducts the New York Philharmonic for the first time, in a program that includes Jonathan Harvey’s tidal tone poem “Tranquil Abiding” (1998), Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” and his galvanic Piano Concerto No. 1, with Kirill Gerstein as a late replacement for an injured Jonathan Biss.

In the 2016-17 season she will arrive at the Metropolitan Opera with a high-profile debut assignment: the company premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s acclaimed “L’Amour de Loin” (2000), featuring the return of the director Robert Lepage in the wake of his much-maligned Met production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. That is the same season she takes over as music director of her hometown Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, her first such position with a major symphonic ensemble.

“The question is how much of your life you want to spend on an airplane,” Ms. Malkki said of her jam-packed schedule in an interview at her Los Angeles hotel in March. “I think life is important. Work is not everything, but I really love what I’m doing. It’s been very busy for the past 10 or 15 years, and I love every minute of it.”

Orchestras have embraced her clear, passionate style and her unusually catholic taste in repertory. Her knowledge of the standard canon is complemented by an expertise in contemporary music honed during her seven years (2006-13) as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

“She’s one of the most gifted conductors of her generation,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “She’s got a profound talent and a great intellect. She develops a sense of trust with an orchestra, and they really believe in her.”

Image

Ms. Malkki conducting at the Ravinia Festival.CreditPatrick Gipson

Fresh faces in front of the New York Philharmonic these days are naturally going to be evaluated in a different light as the orchestra mulls a music director to replace Alan Gilbert when he leaves in 2017. While Ms. Malkki warrants attention, she may not be even a dark-horse candidate because of her coming commitment in Helsinki. She carefully demurred when asked if she had given thought to the position, even as she expressed interest in someday leading an American ensemble if it could be “the right place at the right time.”

“This kind of orchestra, of course, will want to work with someone they know from a long time, I think that’s kind of obvious,” she said. “And I think that would be very wise, also,” adding — with a smile but without naming names — that she has her own favorites for the New York position.

Born in Helsinki in 1969, Ms. Malkki grew up musical — singing before she spoke, according to family lore — and quickly took up the violin, piano and, especially, cello. Conducting was at that point more or less closed off to women, even gifted ones.

“I was always interested in conducting,” she said. “But of course there are historical reasons why I was hesitant at the beginning, or wary. It was not an option, really. It’s a fact. If you think 20, 25 years ago, it was very different back then. Things have changed quite quickly.”

Drawn to the physical beauty and rich sonorities of the cello, she began to study it seriously, though even while playing in youth orchestras she found herself fascinated by the conductors she worked with. When she applied to the position of principal cellist in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, she also applied to the conducting class at Finland’s prestigious Sibelius Academy.

“I was in a moment where a lot of young people are,” she said: “ ‘What next?’ ” Both opportunities panned out, complicating matters, and she commuted between the Gothenburg orchestra and her conducting studies for a few years. This wasn’t permanently tenable and, testing the waters, she took a year’s leave from the Sibelius Academy and devoted herself full time to the orchestral job.

“It was wonderful,” she said. “But I knew it was not where I was supposed to be. And then things went very well relatively quickly after that.”

Her first important conducting assignment was her diploma exam at the academy in 1999, when she conducted the Finnish premiere of Thomas Adès’s uproarious chamber opera “Powder Her Face.” Mr. Adès was there and, impressed, invited her to England to assist him with other performances of the work. There she met her agent, from the influential firm Harrison Parrott, and began attracting international notice. She made her debut with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2004, just as it was searching for a new music director.

Image

Ms. Malkki leading the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Ligeti’s “Chamber Concerto.”CreditHiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Working with the eminent ensemble, founded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez, gave her yet more credibility and experience in new music. “The world of contemporary music, it’s not small,” she said. “But it’s a network, and if there are artists who do it and make some kind of decent result, the word gets around.”

The word definitely got around for Ms. Malkki, though she has been powerful in older work, too, as when she led the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra two years ago in a gripping, vital-yet-never-overwrought program of early pieces by Strauss, Debussy and Messiaen. She has also cultivated a wide repertory in Brahms, Schumann, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ravel and Prokofiev — adroitly avoiding being pigeonholed as a new-music specialist. Opera, too, is in the mix, though she says symphonic repertory is where she feels most at home and her schedule allows for just one or two productions a year, at least for the time being.

She suggested “Tranquil Abiding,” which has a teeming grandeur touched with a luminous sense of the spiritual, to the Philharmonic for her debut. While she has not conducted it elsewhere, she has led other Harvey works and collaborated with him before his death in 2012. “He was very happy with the way I was interpreting his music,” she said, “so I feel confident that I’m transmitting at least something right.”

For several years, too busy with conducting, she gave up the cello entirely but recently returned to it, playing alone and in small chamber groups in Paris, where she is now based. “I had missed it without knowing I had missed it,” she said. “As a conductor you have your territory, but then there’s this area that belongs to the musicians which is about the exact sound and articulation. I respect that, and if I play also, I can do it myself. I enjoy the physical act of producing sound.”

The string section, of course, is the largest in a symphony orchestra, and, given the delicate diplomacy that goes on between a conductor and her musicians, it can come in handy to have one’s roots in that bloc. As Ms. Borda said, with a laugh: “Often one of the true tests of a conductor is, have they been a string player?”

Asked how her experience as an orchestral musician had helped prepare her to deal with orchestras, Ms. Malkki said: “I wouldn’t use the expression ‘deal with.’ I think I know what they need, obviously, and part of the conductor’s work is very practical. There are very different ways of approaching the music altogether, but people also speak about conducting technique and gestures, and everyone who has sat in an orchestra knows it. It’s so great when you understand what a conductor’s doing.”

Orchestras have embraced that clarity; not only has she been invited to appear with ensembles like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but — more tellingly — she has also been invited to return. Given important music director openings like New York’s, she has to consider the full arc of her career, but says she most values relationships like that between James Levine and the Met orchestra, developed over decades.

“The Helsinki thing,” she said of her new position, “I wouldn’t want to think about it as some kind of bus stop. I would really like to build something on the long term. There are different kinds of careers and there are conductors who are doing positions a couple of years here and a couple of years there, and I’m not that kind.”

But it seems entirely possible, even inevitable, that Ms. Malkki will end up spending a substantial amount of time on this side of the Atlantic. “She’s smart, she has great human skills, and she’s hard working,” Ms. Borda said. “She will be a great music director for a major American orchestra.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR16 of the New York edition with the headline: A Conductor’s Many Happy Returns . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Sign up for the Louder Newsletter

Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.